Give Me Useful AI, You Jerks

Ok listen. I know enough coding stuff for my own work that I have a decent idea of what’s easy to accomplish and what’s difficult to accomplish with the magic of computers. So I do appreciate how much work must have gone into generative AI. In my field we’re still trying to get machine learning to reliably count fruit on trees, which is, in actuality, a huge challenge. Making a whole multi-color image based on a text prompt is bananas-difficult software engineering. Creating a model that can generate poems with rhyme and meter based on a text prompt is amazing, it really is.

I just don’t have a use for it, like ever. I am both a control freak and very funny, and generative AI cannot give me exactly what I want when it comes to Bits. It’s still inferior to me. Except for maybe Shrimp Jesus, that’s very funny. I have yet to see an application for generative AI beyond Bits. I am not going to argue this with you right now.

I think maybe the people who sunk all their time and money into these very challenging machine learning algorithms didn’t actually ask themselves what it was all for. I think this because a common question I ask with beginning startups is, “But what is it for?” And often I cannot get an answer. But now these people have staked billions of dollars on the Bit generators that aren’t even very good at generating Bits, and they’re hell-bent on going down with their unprofitable ship.

Anyway.

No one asked for my opinion here, which is why I have to put it on my blog that three people read. But I do have an AI product that I actually want, that I think is actually perfectly doable with existing datasets and machine learning algorithms. If the product is good enough I could even see paying a subscription for it, you money-grubbing VC goons, you!

I want AI-enabled navigation. I want a full-ass Tony Stark Jarvis AI assistant in my Maps app. When I am on a long road trip and tired of highway driving, I want to be able to ask maps how much longer the rest of my trip would be if I took backroads for the remainder. I want to ask for navigation to a place on the other side of town and specify that I would like to avoid any unprotected left turns. I would like to ask the time differential if I take 294 around Chicago all the way to I-90 versus taking 294 to 290 to 90.

I’m not an Apple girlie, my experience is with Google Maps. But Google has traffic data, Google knows where the stoplights are, and I know Google knows the time differential on my routes because it likes to fucking lecture me when I choose to take a slightly longer route. Which reminds me of another thing: I want to be able to ask my navigation “Is this actually a faster route or is it only going to save me like two minutes?” And then I want it to answer “No, it’s only two tenths of a mile shorter,” so that I can say “Well then just keep me on the original route, stop messing with my shit,” and it will respond “Yes ma’am.”

As long as I’m here asking for things, I would also like the data this assistant collects to be stored locally on my device and to never be sold to advertisers. That feels like more of a pie-in-the-sky dream than the AI-assisted navigation, honestly.

To sum this up, if anybody needs a beta tester for AI-assisted navigation, I’m game.